PODCAST

Old Mole Reading List

Larry Bowlden reviews contemporary fiction and non-fiction as part of the Old Mole Variety Hour. Monday mornings on KBOO 90.7 fm, Portland, Oregon.

arts literature

All Episodes

The Heaven and Earth Grocery by James McBride

Old Mole Reading List ·

2024/01/30

Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian-born theater owner, opens the small town’s first integrated dance hall. His wife Chona runs The Heaven and Earth Grocery store on Chicken Hill, which caters to Blacks and European immigrants, mostly Jewish. Chona is generous and warm-hearted, and though the store makes little profit, she is loved by all the residents of Chicken Hill.All of this wonderful novel, by James McBride, and entitled The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is devoted to the description of the lives of the

en-us

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See

Old Mole Reading List ·

2023/09/25

This story begins in 1469, in the fifth year of the Chenghua emperor’s reign, when Tan Yunxian was eight years old.So begins Lisa See’s superb account of Chinese medicine in the 15th century. On one level it is a simple story of a girl, Tan, who wants to become a doctor and is tutored by her grandparents who are both doctors. Her best friend Meiling is in training to be a midwife, and the two girls pursue their dreams under the kind but demanding eyes of Tan’s grandparents. The book is worth reading

en-us

Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee

Old Mole Reading List ·

2023/08/14

We are told not to judge a book by its, cover, but I invite you to judge this book by its delicious cover, the content as rich and colorful as its cover. Pomegranate, by Helen Elaine Lee, is deeply insightful, sad and transformative.The book begins and ends with the same refrain:I live my life forward and backward.Seems like my body remembers what I can’t afford to forgetHere I am alive and awake. Still going forward and backward. And brave enough to tell about it.Ranita Atwater is finishing up a

en-us

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Old Mole Reading List ·

2023/07/03

1900, Travancore, South IndiaShe is twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning. Mother and daughter lie on the mat, their wet cheeks glued together.“The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding,” her mother says. “After that, God willing, it gets better.”So begins Abraham Verghese’s masterwork, The Covenant of Water, a sprawling novel that involves three generations, two continents, and several geographic locations. It is a superb piece of writing, but not, I think, a

en-us

River Sing Me Home by Elenor Shearer

Old Mole Reading List ·

2023/05/15

Let me begin by allowing Eleanora Shearer to say in her own words why she wrote this beautiful/awful novel:My aim in writing this novel was to bring to life a story about the Caribbean in the aftermath of slavery—a place and time that is not always well-known or well understood. Doing this history justice was incredibly important to me, especially given my family ties to the Caribbean. To make this story as accurate as possible, I have chosen to use some terms—such as “mulatto” and “Negro”—that

en-us

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Old Mole Reading List ·

2023/04/03

The best way to introduce you to young Demon Copperhead is to let him announce his entrance:First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it. On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the

en-us

One Brilliant Flame by Joy Castro

Old Mole Reading List ·

2023/03/06

Joy Castro is a brilliant writer of historical fiction. Many of you readers will know her for her novel Flight Risk. Today I want to talk to you about her 2023 novel, One Brilliant Flame. In her afterward entitled “Gratitude”, she explains part of her motive for writing the book: For most of my life—and I am fifty-four now—I knew nothing about the political history of Key West or its importance as a rebel base for the anti-colonial insurgency in Cuba. It is a moment in US history that has been

en-us

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley

Old Mole Reading List ·

2023/01/23

Most readers know of Walter Mosley via his masterful Easy Rawlins mystery series. His faithful readers would no doubt hurry to get hold of a new book in that series, but my hunch is that Mosley wanted to speak with a different voice than the relatively well off Easy Rawlins who has both money and muscles on his side. Instead, the hero of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned is Socrates Fortlow, a man of the streets, a convicted murderer who spent twenty-seven years in jail and has been out of jail

en-us

A Tribute to Novelist Sue Miller

Old Mole Reading List ·

2022/12/20

Although this happened more when I was younger, I occasionally run into an author who so impresses me that I know I will read all of her work as soon as I can get hold of it. Sue Miller is just such an author. I have now read all but one of her long list of excellent novels including her memoir of her father, The Story of My Father.The recurring themes in her novels had already convinced me that much of her fiction is autobiographical, and her memoir of her father solidified that conviction. It is

en-us

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

Old Mole Reading List ·

2022/11/21

I know next to nothing about horses and am, at best, a sloppy historian. Geraldine Brooks knows tons about horses and is a superb historian. Her 2022 book, Horse, fascinated me from the first page to the last. Her character Jess, in 2019, is an articulator, i.e. a combination artist and zoologist who puts together skeletons. She is hired by the Smithsonian Museum to dis-articulate and then re-articulate a famous horse skeleton. Dr. Catherine Morgan is a scientific researcher whom Jess has been

en-us

Monogamy by Sue Miller

Old Mole Reading List ·

2022/09/05

He’s been much more careful in his marriage to Annie. More careful and more faithful. Yet not entirely faithful. Which is partly what’s making him remember the end with Frieda.Because he’s done it again.Sue Miller has done it again: written an astounding novel about family life and all of its complexities.In her newest novel, Monogamy, published in 2020, Miller undertakes to describe in meticulous detail the marriage of Graham and Annie. I will not be spoiling the novel for you readers by telling

en-us

The Taste of Ginger by Mansi Shah

Old Mole Reading List ·

2022/08/01

Preeti Desai is a successful corporate lawyer who has, in her estimation, finally achieved the assimilation into American culture that she had striven all of her life to achieve. But then a horrible accident involving her brother and sister-in-law, call her back to India, and she realizes how much she still walks like and elephant. Her mother has told her this so often. “I was around nine years old when I realized she wasn’t calling me fat. She meant that I wasn’t demure and obedient—qualities ever

en-us

Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt

Old Mole Reading List ·

2022/07/04

Judy Blunt wrote these lovely snapshots of thirty years of life on wheat and cattle ranches in northeastern Montana as memoir. It stuns me that I had not run across this book before, finally gathered together as a book in 2002. Many, even most, of my reader friends had read this long ago. I’m happy I discovered the volume on a friend’s bookshelf during a recent train trip to Salt lake City.In August of 1986, I left Phillips County with a new divorce and an old car, with three scared kids and some

en-us

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Old Mole Reading List ·

2022/05/23

Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist who, perhaps unfortunately, is also beautiful.Once a research chemist, Elizabeth Zott was a woman with flawless skin and an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and never would be.The main character in Bonnie Garmus’ delightful 2022 novel, Lessons in Chemistry is as stubborn as she is brilliant. She refuses to be seen as simply an extension of her Nobel Prize nominated boyfriend whom she lives with but refuses to marry. Her hiring by a scientific

en-us

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Old Mole Reading List ·

2022/04/18

Teacher seeks pupil. Must hast have an earnest desire to save the worldApply in personThis ad enrages the narrator of the book, Ishmael. Although he has in the past sought a teacher, he is now disillusioned, and angry at the naive audacity of the ad. He answers the ad simply to expose the person who wrote it as a fake. Imagine his response when he discovers just who that is.Because it was backed by darkness, the glass in this window was black—opaque, reflective. I made no attempt to see beyond as I

en-us

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

Old Mole Reading List ·

2022/03/21

Black Cake is a sprawling, brilliant debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson. It is hard to believe it is a debut novel, since the writing is so rich and complex, but she has been writing for a long time.Benedetta Bennet (known as Benny), and Coventina (Covey) have been best friends for life, and their voices are two of the most important narrative voices in this novel, although there are a host of narrators representing generations of families. The chapters are split between then (1965) and now (2018)

en-us

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab

Old Mole Reading List ·

2022/01/03

Try to imagine what it would be like to not be remembered by anyone. Adeline Larue has made the mistake of praying to the dark gods to be free and to live without fear of death. The title of this Faustian tale isThe Invisible Life of Addie Larue, by V.E. Schwab.The author warns us in a prefatory note which she attributes to Estele Magritte, 1642-1719:The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle , unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you

en-us

The Hidden Child by Louise Fein

Old Mole Reading List ·

2021/12/13

If you are one of the many who believe that eugenics was a tool only of Nazi Germany, you should read the excellent and thoroughly researched historical novel by Louise Fein entitled, The Hidden Child.Often, the best way of really bringing home the horrors of a practice is to embody it, to show how real people are affected by the practice. Louise Fein has done just that in her sad but wonderful novel. As Eleanor is watching over her beautiful five year old child, Mabel, frolicking in a park,

en-us

Oh William by Elizabeth Strout

Old Mole Reading List ·

2021/11/01

Believe me, I am giving nothing away by beginning my remarks by quoting the last page of Elizabeth’s Strout’s new novel, Oh WilliamAnd then I thought, Oh William!But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! too?Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.This may be the only thing in the world I know to be

en-us

A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier

Old Mole Reading List ·

2021/10/18

It is 1932, England and all of Europe is still under the cloud of World War I. So many men died in the war that there are thousands upon thousands of young widows or unmarried ‘spinsters’ who are dubbed ‘surplus woman', woman who will be unlikely to marry or have children. Violet Speedwell is one such woman; at thirty-eight, she has lost both her older brother and her finance, Laurence. Violet’s mother is inconsolable over the death of her oldest son, and is super-critical of her daughter, so much

en-us

25 results

Old Mole Reading List

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Start The Breakthrough Full Audiobook Now, Thriller Fans!

thebookvoice.com

Get Hooked On The Life-Enhancing Full Audiobook Experience!

thebookvoice.com

西四五条

主播郑捕头

Podcast Patapoe

0d0a

On Mic Podcast

Jordan Rich